Hiya! Planning on running my first ever Urban Shadows game in a week or so. I’m fairly experienced with Apoc World, so the rules all make sense, but I’m just wondering about how much prep is worth doing prior to the game.
For instance, 80% of all my AW games have had the entire setting created during character creation, villains plots and all. Have people experienced similar things with Urban Shadows?
Secondly, in AW it’s easy to tell someone “you have no food, what do you do next?” and create an impetus that way. Is there a similar big red button in Urban Shadows, or will I need to be more creative with my plots?
Get with your players and pick a city in advance. Do your homework on that city: landmarks, history, etc. Come to the table with ideas about what you might want to see explored in the game.
If your running AW, you might come to the table having explored post-apocalyptic imagery–not because you’re creating your setting in advance, but because you’re preparing yourself to barf forth apocalyptica. Do the same sort of thing for Urban Shadows.
I’d say after PC and debt creation you have a solid lead to follow easily.
My biggest problem with US is tying all the PCs together. Few tips I find useful:
– Have few players, so that scenes with one of them out don’t leave them hanging for that long.
– Prepare a bunch of ideas and events beforehand that could drag them in.
– Encourage and reward players for behaving in a way that entangles the rest of the PCs.
Alan Scott I’m currently neck-deep in Dresden Files, anything else that you’d recommend?
Alpo _ one bit of game advice I got was to start all games like an AA meeting: “Hi everyone, my name is ___.”
“Hi __. Tell us, how did you meet [player to the left]?” and running from there. I’ll see if I can find some good hooks as well!
Angus Warman In US, that is already codified in the game when you do your initial debts.
Alpo _ Gotcha! I should probably give that section a closer read XD
the (not-so)-big red button in US is “hey, NPC so and so asks you to repay a favour you owe them”.
Since AW is about scarcity (you have no food), and US is about intrigue, you can start some conspiracy or dark pact that directly threatens th PCs.
Everyone else has made great comments, but one more note…
Urban Shadows has lots of tools that the PCs can use to solve mysteries and discover potential courses of action. They can call in Debts, hit the streets, let it out to access their psychic powers, etc.
Often (before I hit the red button of an NPC shows up), I will try to get the PCs to take advantage of one of those options. I want them to get used to being proactive, to be actors in the drama instead of just participants. 😀
Diego Minuti and in classic style, I should totally ask for them to repay two favours at once 🙂
Mark Diaz Truman can you explain a little bit more? How would you get them to take advantage of it?
Players sometimes get stuck because they are thinking about the resources they have in front of them instead of what they could have if they thought like their characters would think. In other words, the character at the table is kinda limited; we only know what we’ve already established about them.
So when a player gets stumped, I try to remind them that we have a ton of tools to make the world a bigger place. Don’t know who killed someone? Hit the streets and find out from a new character. Don’t have enough backup to go somewhere safely? Cash in a Debt and get some hitters to come with you (even better if they are PCs).
Is that helpful?
Mark Diaz Truman it definitely is. I think I’m gonna try and wrangle it so someone has a debt on a whole bunch of them, and wants a job done by some deniable assets.
The job may, or may not, be to collect on someone who the players also have a debt with. That should be enough to cause some trouble
Angus Warman – I think the strength of the game is that you don’t need to think that far ahead. In fact, trying to get everyone aligned that way may be a lot of effort that kinda throws off the fun engine in the middle of the game.
Urban Shadows isn’t a game with a “party,” where the group goes and does stuff together all the time. It can happen, but it’s just as often the case that the scenes are 2-3 PCs at a time, rotating between different combinations. For example:
The Oracle has an old friend show up, dying. The friend collapses on her floor, telling her that she needs to get a gem from the Wizard’s Council archives before a demon gets to it and destroys it.
Who does the Oracle go to? What does she do next? She’s got a few Debts on other PCs, she can hit the streets, she can try use her powers… but what will she do?
The main engine of the game is going to mix the characters up in each other’s stuff, but playing to find out what happens means letting go of the overall narrative and trusting that your prep and the moves will guide the group somewhere productive.
(It makes a ton of sense in this model for one NPC to show up and demand work done by a deniable asset, but not the whole group…)
Does that make sense?
Ruben Navarro